Does Social Pressure Hinder Entrepreneurship in Africa? The Forced Mutual Help Hypothesis - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Economica Année : 2020

Does Social Pressure Hinder Entrepreneurship in Africa? The Forced Mutual Help Hypothesis

Résumé

In the absence of a public safety net, wealthy Africans have the social obligation to share their re- sources with their needy relatives in the form of cash transfers and inefficient family hiring. We develop a model of entrepreneurial choice that accounts for this social redistributive constraint. We derive pre- dictions regarding employment choices, productivity, and profitability of firms ran by entrepreneurs of African versus non-African origin. Everything else equal, local firms are over-staffed and less productive than firms owned by nonlocals, which discourages local entrepreneurship. Using data from the manu- facturing sector, we illustrate the theory by structurally estimating the proportion of missing African entrepreneurs. Our estimates, which are suggestive due to the data limitation, vary between 8% and 12.6% of the formal sector workforce. Implications for the role of social protection are discussed.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
wp_tse_956.pdf (593.63 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
Loading...

Dates et versions

hal-02929477 , version 1 (03-09-2020)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-02929477 , version 1

Citer

Philippe Alby, Emmanuelle Auriol, Pierre Nguimkeu. Does Social Pressure Hinder Entrepreneurship in Africa? The Forced Mutual Help Hypothesis. Economica, 2020, 87 (346), pp.299-327. ⟨hal-02929477⟩
30 Consultations
92 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More